News: Wu-Tang Is in the Hiz-Ouse, Farm Dawg!

What is it that all gamers need more of? Halo deathmatch? Vanille? The touch of a woman? No. What gamers need in abundance is more FarmVille clones based around aging gangster rapper possies that have not been relevant for the better part of a decade, or at least that is what OMGPOP will be hoping is the case next week when they roll out their Wu-Tang Clan inspired FarmVille-like, The Street, across Facebook.

OMGPOP, the developer behind the flavour of the month iOS title: Draw Something (a game that allows weeaboos to draw pictures of their junk and send it to one another), has turned their hand toward Facebook social gaming mimicry, promising much in the way of inappropriate Rapville spam from inconsiderate Facebook acquaintances. OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter claims that the full ghetto cast of the Wu-Tang Clan will make an appearance in the game, and promises that The Street will be “the realist game ever on Facebook”.

While the man makes some big promises, it still remains to be seen whether OMGPOP can balance a viable online economy, trading predominantly in forties and bitches. With Facebook browser games having reached a new nadir, one wonders whether there is anywhere to go but up.

Pyramid Head Rape Clock

Konami Butcher Silent Hill HD Collection

Cautious gamers holding off from buying the Silent Hill HD Collection were this week vindicated, as Konami (by way of Hijinx Studios) turned in a HD re-release that would make Ubisoft blush. Funnily enough, this HD port does not seem to have been rendered mediocre through a lack of effort, but rather through a misuse of resources. Hijinx Studios appear to have spent copious amounts of development time and capital on extensively retexturing the game, creating new art assets, and recording all new dialogue – and yet they accomplished all of this without ever first insuring that the core game performed to the minimum acceptable standard. The game is by all accounts rife with bugs, and worse still, has been shown to feature some of the most obnoxious censorship this side of Final Fantasy VI (GBA).

Silent Hill fans will be dismayed to learn that one of the most iconic sequences of the entire series (the Pyramid Head mannequin rape scene) has been heavily edited for the re-release, a decision that is as mystifying as it is worrying. On top of that precarious foundation is said to rest a multitude of bugs including: vanishing walls, audio which cuts out, missing textures, a substantially brightened image contrast, and an erratic frame-rate which can slow to a crawl if the player is unfortunate enough to earn an achievement. If that were not bad enough, Hijinx Studios has also decided to drastically scale back the thick fog which pervaded the original titles. This decision would have been fine were it not for the fact that many of the game’s environments were blatantly unfinished beneath their concealing shroud, essentially creating an effect akin to lifting a girl’s skirts only to find the wire mesh and metal stand of a dress maker’s dummy.

When linked to before and after comparison shots on Twitter, Masahiro Ito (the art director for Silent Hill 1-3) responded with incredulity: “Left side is HD, isn’t it? It’s poor…” “It’s really a released version? Really?” “OMG!!!” “Yes, they didn’t have to release this condition version”. One cannot help but feel for the man – it is one thing to have a favoured childhood experience disrespected for a little easy money, but quite another to have a former employer present one’s artistic magnum opus in such a way as to have it appear as crude and inept.

Mass Effect 3 Endings Suck

Bioware Agree to Sell Gamers the Proper Ending to Mass Effect 3

Whether rightly or wrongly, a substantial portion of the Mass Effect fanbase have been vocally upset about the way in which the series has closed out its third and final chapter. Some fans have expressed their dissatisfaction through positive channels, raising tens of thousands of dollars for Penny Arcade’s Child’s Play charity in the process, while still others have made their voices heard by reporting Bioware to the Federal Trade Commission. At any rate, it would appear that all of the carping has not been for naught, with Bioware seemingly relenting in order to magnanimously sell gamers the proper ending to Mass Effect 3.

Citing “incredibly painful” gamer feedback, Bioware co-founder Dr. Ray Muzyka stated: “Exec. Producer Casey Hudson and the team are hard at work on a number of game content initiatives that will help answer the questions, providing more clarity for those seeking further closure to their journey”. While this statement might seem like mana from heaven to disenchanted Mass Effect fans, they would nevertheless be well advised to temper their expectations regarding the incoming content. Muzyka’s placating statement is vaguely worded at best, and could simply amount to his harnessing of the prevailing mood in order to sell game DLC which is already in the pipeline. Moreover, even if Bioware are serious about retouching the ending, Muzyka is at pains to mention his intention to not have it violate the artistic integrity of the original story – which seems to have been the problem to begin with. At any rate, while retconned endings may be welcome, one cannot help but think the price of admission would be better spent on charity.

18 Comments

I always thought Farmville looked amazing, but “it could use more gangster stuff.” I’m not sure who didn’t.

What did they censor in FFVI(GBA)? Aside from doing brutal murder on the music it seemed OK when I played it. I didn’t bother with the crappy post-game dungeon they added (because I don’t embracing exceedingly terrible things).

Mass Effect 3’s endings are just so bad. Either the ending(s) make absolutely no sense whatsoever or the convoluted fan “Indoc Theory” that people have come up with is true in which case the game didn’t have an ending. It just stopped. So either we have massive continuity errors on a scale that I don’t think has happened in any medium before. And I’m including terrible D movies that are amazingly terrible here. Schizophrenics watch the Mass Effect 3 ending and think it was made by dangerous lunatics. Or it took thousands of people discussing the “ending” to figure out what happened, and it wasn’t even an ending just a thing that comes before an actual ending.

Another example of this industry pretending survival horror fans don’t exist anymore. They just keep shitting on us and denying we’re worth catering to anymore. I’m not asking for tank controls and pre-rendered backdrops anymore, but this doesn’t mean they HAVE to make games like RE5 or squirt out half efforts like this Silent Hill HD collection. sigh

@Mel: This week I almost reported on Capcom’s claim that RE6 won’t be a horror game because it wouldn’t sell enough copies. I wonder how Capcom are able to reconcile their nonsense with the fact that Dead Space doesn’t seem to have any trouble selling.

With Silent Hill HD Collection, I have to wonder why Konami didn’t simply port the HD PC versions. We wouldn’t have got the nice re-texturing of the HD collection, but that is immaterial given the trade-offs it makes in terms of performance, polish and stability.

@SN: At this point, I almost feel like they’re doing it intentionally to sabotage the genre and make it appear less viable than it is so they can justify jumping on the safe-bet-bandwagon of other actiony games.

Oh, there’s no market for survival horror? Yeah, not when the genre is bereft of games and/or awash with pitiful ones like this SH collection.

Yea, I think you’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head. To the best of my knowledge RE made the jump to action before the series stopped selling games, while Team Silent was disbanded after one lackluster game which was never originally intended to be a Silent Hill game. Then the first proper Resident Evil game in years is released on the 3DS, which I don’t really think is a natural fit for horror. You’re right, it’s a bit hard to maintain interest in a genre when there’s a huge black hole in the release schedule, and then the few genre titles that are released tend to be crappy.

I was prepared for the worst, but didn’t think Mass Effect 3’s ending was all that bad. Even were that not the case, the prospect of complaining to the federal government for a change makes no sense and is a huge waste of time and money for all involved. That along with the release of DLC to sell expanded endings sets a pretty bleak precedent.

@Def: Agreed. What next, are we to sue authors if we don’t like the endings to their books–and movie directors if we are annoyed by the constant shouting of “YIPPIE!” and the terrible, terrible love plot?

If you do not like the ending of a game, do not buy games from those developers WITHOUT READING REVIEWS FIRST! Argh! Sense!

Resident Evil 4 wasn’t scary really. There was plenty of atmosphere and creepiness, but maybe a few jump scares was about it. That said, it was a great game and I think it was the best in the series. “Whatcha’ buyin’?” Give me more RE4, Capcom, you terrible, lazy bastards.

@DefChaos, My problem with the ME3 ending is that it makes extremely little sense. Or, if the Indoctrination Theory is right, isn’t even an ending: the game just stops. It’s like watching a movie for the first, let’s say Fight Club, and in the last ten minutes your friend gets up and turns off the TV. Failing to resolve the central, several game-spanning conflict in the plot is dreadful. I think Bioware thought letting you talk to everyone before the final mission was all the resolution people wanted, and that we’d be glad to pay $15 a few months later when they tack on an actual ending. Which is pretty bizzarre.

I don’t like the idea of bilking people for “the real ending”, but if the ending we got was genuinely what they wanted to be “the real ending” and it lacked resolution…Well, not every ending needs to include resolution. I get that this upsets people, but what I don’t get is why they then believe they’re owed “the real ending”.

Keep in mind that I haven’t played this game nor do I intend to get into it since my ME1 and 2 save files are no longer available to me and I’ve kinda lost the will pick up ME3.

So true. I was talking with a friend who re-bought a PS3 the other day and was suggesting he pick up ME2 because it was only like $15 new. And I was surprised to find we both thought buying new games was a bad idea. Until publishers decide to stop screwing people with charging $60 and then further screwing them with multiple $10-15 DLC I think people should stop giving them their money for it. So until then (they probably won’t) I’ll stick to only playing new games that are of the “absolutely must play” level of wantingtoplayedness.